The Mother's Day Murder: The Startling True Story of a Seductive, Murdering Wife and her Three Teenage Pawns

INTRODUCTION

The smooth functioning of the world depends on a mother’s nurturing, raising and protection of her child. But mothers are not without their ferocious side.

Moms are supposed to make us suffer. It’s their Darwinian function. They give birth to us. They set the standards and expect us to meet them. They teach us the skills we need to survive in the world before they force us out of their nest.

Carl Jung believed that attitudes towards all mothers were influenced by the innate human predisposition to think that certain qualities are exclusively a mother’s.

According to Jung, the human unconscious holds up mothers as archetypes with both positive and negative qualities.

Mothers possess a wide range of attributes such as solitude, wisdom, fertility, feminism, sympathy, helpfulness and mystical powers countered by darkness, secretiveness, a desire to devour—and seductiveness.

While many of us see our real mother as solicitous and kind, we may also reluctantly concede that she is or was seductive. If we think she is magical and feminine, we may also believe she is secretive.

Just think of such diverse mothers as the Greek goddess Demeter, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Hindu goddess Kali and the wicked stepmother of so many fairy tales. It is no surprise that we celebrate their existence.

The original Mother’s Day, like all holidays, was of pagan origin and held in Asia Minor in honor of the goddess Cybele. She was known as the Great Mother, or the Mother of the Gods.

Cybele was involved in many bizarre rituals, which eventually led to her banishment by Rome.

So it was that the cult of the Great Mother was cruelly weakened even before the coming of Christ.

The poet and classicist Robert Graves saw the battle between the pagan Goddess and the Hebrew and Christian God to be fundamental to the development of Western civilization.

In his book King Jesus, Graves claimed this was proved because Jesus of Nazareth declared war on The Female or the White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death.

As the earliest known European deity, the White Goddess also appeared as the New, Full and Old Moon and was also called the Triple Goddess.

Christianity’s male Trinity, said Graves, triumphed over the trinity of the Goddess. The Western male conquered the Eastern and agricultural female.

In victory, the institutional and patriarchal Holy Roman Catholic Church subsumed and welcomed its former opponents by calling itself Mother Church.

That was when a form of Mother’s Day returned in honor of the church. Then in the fifth century, devotion to the Virgin Mary emerged as a new Mother cult, with this Mother of God firmly replacing Cybele, the Mother of the Gods. Meanwhile, in the Celtic continent and British Isles, the powerful Goddess Brigit was replaced by St. Brigid, her Christian successor. Her sacred Mother’s Day, which was connected with the ewes coming in to milk, became St. Brigid’s Day.

Formal mother worship was never completely wiped out, so Mother’s Day in the British Isles was merged into Mothering Day by the seventeenth century.

On the fourth Sunday of Lent, children- returned home with small gifts and mothering cakes—fruitcake.

In America, the second Sunday in May was declared Mother’s Day by congressional resolution in 1914. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed mothers the greatest source of the country’s strength and inspiration.

But celebrating Mother’s Day is not just about a mother’s triumphs. For there is a certain brand of ferocity behind the goodness and caring nature of mothers.

PROLOGUE

MOTHER’S DAY. SUNDAY, MAY 11, 1997

10:40 P.M.—AUGUSTA, GEORGIA

The .38 caliber nickel-plated Taurus with a 3-inch barrel and black Pachmeye grips was loaded with three blue-tip ball-type bullets. The teenager nervously handed his 16-year-old friend the weapon as the two youths approached the single-story house. The younger boy gripped the gun tightly in his hand and panned it around for a few moments, just like he’d seen them do in the movies and on TV.

It was a quiet, warm Sunday night on Old Waynesboro Road, in Richmond County on the southeast edge of the sleepy city of Augusta, Georgia. Suddenly the headlights of a truck swept around the corner from a side street. The two youths ducked into the bushes by the side of the house so they wouldn’t be caught in the full beams.

They waited for the throbbing V-8 to fade in the distance before moving back towards the front door. The younger, much smaller boy cocked the gun unsteadily. His 18-year-old friend knocked on the door and they waited. And waited. And waited.

The older youth tried again. This time much harder. The two teenagers heard movements inside the house, followed by the shuffling of feet towards the front door.

The boy’s grip on the gun tightened. He was so tense he started to fear that he might pull the trigger too soon.

Then the latch inside the front door snapped and it opened gently. A bleary-eyed man in his mid-thirties in a T-shirt and jeans stood in front of the boys.

The schoolboy’s finger squeezed tight on the trigger. The .38 exploded with a loud pop. The bullet entered the man’s left cheek and exited out the back of his skull. Then the 16-year-old fired a second shot for good measure. That bullet entered through the neck, passed through the trachea and exited from the victim’s back. His life had been snuffed out before his body had even crumpled to the floor.

The two youths looked at each other, eyes filled with terror, fear, excitement and a twisted sense of achievement. Then they snapped out of the trance, turned and ran and ran and ran.

*   *   *

A few minutes later Mrs. Gina Spann arrived at her home at 3805 Old Waynesboro Road, walked through the back door of the single-storey house and headed towards the front room where her husband often watched TV.

The first thing she noticed was that the front door was wide open. She moved across the room with slight trepidation, unsure if she really wanted to find out why.

Then she saw the corpse of her husband, Kevin, crumpled on the floor of the entranceway. Blood was pouring from the head wound. He wasn’t moving and she sensed the moment she looked at him that he must be dead.

Every now and again headlights eerily lit up the front room as cars sped past, blissfully unaware of the tragedy that had just unfolded a few yards away.

Gina Spann leaned down to touch her husband. There was no response but surely there was something she could do. She called out to him, Kevin? Kevin?

Nothing.

*   *   *

Not far away those two youths were, in the words of one, pretty much haul[ing] ass as they moved swiftly across the roads and fields towards a local wood to try and put as much distance as they could between themselves and the cold-blooded crime they had just committed.

As the two teenagers crept across one pitch-black back yard a dog growled. It sounded very close by. Suddenly they found themselves face to face with a Rottweiler, baring yellow teeth that glistened in the moonlight. The animal was coming in their direction. The teenagers stood rooted to the spot in fear.

The Rottweiler leapt at them both but froze in midair. It was only then they realized the animal was on a chain and he was straining to get any closer than one foot from them. The two youths swallowed nervously and headed off into the nearby fields.

A few minutes later, as they crossed through a small wood, the 16-year-old silently pulled the .38 out of his jacket and threw it towards a bunch of bushes. The older youth never had a chance to say that they should have made more effort to hide the weapon.

Eventually they reached the other side of the wood and burst onto Tobacco Road panting and sweating. Faced with a public road and more familiar surroundings, the youths stopped running and began walking at a normal pace up the deserted highway.

A few hundred yards later they reached a pay phone and called a cab.

We wanna go to Ryan’s Steakhouse, the 16-year-old told the cab company operator.

Kinda late for dinner, ain’t it? replied the operator.

*   *   *

Just a short distance away a distraught-sounding Mrs. Gina Spann was dialing 911 …

ONE

Gina Spann was born Gina Lynn Pierce in Belleville, Illinois, on January 12, 1966. Her mother Sue and father Steve led a reasonably quiet, uneventful life for the first few years of Gina’s childhood—but then, not a lot happened in Belleville.

It was the sort of place where most folks minded their own business, got on with their jobs and raised a family. But in the middle of all this mediocrity stood Gina’s father, Steve Pierce. His work barely brought in enough cash to pay for the family’s three-bedroom home on a run-down street on the edge of town.

And when a baby boy, Steve Jr., arrived, followed shortly after by another daughter, Betty Jo, Steve Sr. began staying out nights, much to the irritation of his wife. It was his way of saying he couldn’t cope.

It didn’t take long for Sue Pierce to get wind of some of the gossip that began sweeping around town about her husband. She heard that not only was he picking fights in many of Belleville’s seedier taverns but he was also making a habit of picking up stray women.

At first Sue Pierce chose to ignore the rumors and hope that her husband would grow out of his behavior. But following the birth of Betty Jo, Steve Pierce’s visits to Belleville’s bars and flophouses increased two-fold. He was out all night at least twice a week and offering his wife no excuses when he stumbled in reeking of booze as the kids were waking up for school.

In the fall of 1973, Sue Pierce finally snapped and pointed an accusing finger at her cheating husband. Steve Pierce walked out of the house within days of that first confrontation and was never seen again. It was a devastating blow to his oldest child Gina. She’d reached an age when she knew how to charm her daddy, and he in turn believed she was the only spark of freshness in a troubled life that revolved around going to work, getting drunk and picking up women.

Young Gina had sensed things were not well for some time before the final split and, in the way that only needy children do, she’d tried to compensate for all the problems in the family home by talking to and amusing her father at every opportunity. That made his decision to abandon the family home a very difficult one for young Gina to accept.

Virtually every weekend for years following her father’s departure she’d spend many hours wandering around Belleville in the hope of bumping into him. But she never saw him